Weekly productivity links, the “unplugging” edition

Several of the articles we’ve been reading this week have to do with disengaging from technology for the sake of your sanity / well-being / productivity. It’s a sentiment I think we all can relate to. Life would just be simpler if we could just press the pause button for a while. Here’s a few different articles sharing different experiences and perspectives on our need to unplug and find some calmness.

Usually when we talk about disconnecting, it’s for short periods of time. Paul Miller of The Verge took a much more extreme approach. He cut himself off the internet for an entire year. Yes, a year. He writes a fascinating account of his journey, and how the assumptions he made at the start of the project didn’t always match up with the reality of it.

On a much smaller scale, Kevin Purdy took a week off from email. Looks like he went through all the stages of withdrawal. Checking his phone for non-existent notifications, unconsciously opening browser tabs to check email without thinking about it, but ultimately coming to a point where he realized that most of his email didn’t require the constant attention he was giving it. The experience sounds reminiscent of when I first turned off all the notifications on my phone. The most interesting part for me is his retroactive day-by-day accounting of what actually landed in his inbox.

Here’s some science showing the benefits of disconnecting from incoming communications. In this study, people who were interrupted during a series of test made 20% more errors. But there was another stat that’s an even better argument for intentionally disconnecting. Test subjects who were not interrupted but were told they might be still scored 14% lower than the control group! It appears it’s not just email that’s distracting, it’s the anticipation of email.

Linda Stone researches attention and ways that people find a state of flow. In this Q&A she discusses attention management, some of the physical implications of prolonged computer use (“screen apnea”), and whether or not we should focus on “disconnecting” vs. “connecting to the right things”.

How about you?

Have you indulged the urge to take an email vacation, no-tech saturday, or disconnect from technology in any other way? What’s worked? What did you learn?